Social Media in the Classroom
Social Media in the Classroom
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Problem to be investigated
This study seeks to determine the levels of the engagement that students have with their teachers on social media and whether social media has been in improving the performance of students in class. The use of social media has been increasing in the recent past especially among the students, therefore the need to find out ways in which it can be used to improve the classroom experience.
The purpose of the study
The purpose of this study is to determine how social media has affected classroom learning and how it can be used to improve classroom experience, which would in turn mean better grades for the students and easy and effective teaching for the instructors.
The intended audience for this study will be teachers, students and administrators of institutions who are keen to reduce the negative effect that social media has in classroom learning and gain from the benefits that it promises to bring.
Justification of the study
This study is important in the sense that it provides insights to how social media has been used by students in classroom settings; this will inform this research on how to carry out this (Dabbagh & Kitsantas, 2012). Literature will also provide insights on how scholars designed their research in order to answer their research questions; this will be relevant in this study since the research design used by previous scholars may be applicable to this study, therefore saving on time. The literature reviewed will also be used as a comparison tool for this study to ascertain the precision of the result.
Research questions and Hypothesis
This paper will try to answer the question: does the use of social media in class do more harm than good and how can social media be used to increase the engagement between students and teachers.
Hypothesis 01: The use of social media in learning institutions has done more harm than good.Definition of key terms
Constitutive definitions
The following definitions were obtained from HYPERLINK “http://www.merriam-webster.com/”http://www.merriam-webster.com/.
Social media – Refers to a form of communication that allows people to create virtual communities and share information, ideas and other content
Classroom- it is building or a room where classes are taught
Administrator- an individual who is responsible for the daily running of school or a company
Operational definition
Social media- refers to online networks that students and staff members use to communicate and share with friends and relatives
Classroom – a group of students in a school setting who have access to social media
Administrator- the head of a learning institution who is in charge of the daily running of activities.
Overview of the study
This research will involve a study on the use of social media among students and teachers including how it has affected the learning experience of students in a classroom setting.
The study will involve the collection of primary data from institutions of higher learning, social media users (students and teachers) and information from Facebook administration.
An experimental design will be used where the respondents will be divided into two groups, the experiment group will be allowed to access social sites for a week where statistics on their usage will be carried out, and the other group will not be allowed to use social networks for a week, after the experimentation period, questionnaires were given to the students.
The study will be conducted in three schools where the students’ population is more than 200.
The study population is defined as all the elements involved in a study that satisfy the sample selection criteria to be included in the study, in our case, the population consists of all the students and the teaching staff of selected institutions.
A sample size of 60 students was selected from schools where the experimental group would consist of 40 students and the remaining 20 would belong to the control group. The students who were selected to participate in the study were required to have been in the institution for at least one academic year and must be active users of at least two social media sites.
A questionnaire and an in-depth interview were identified as the most appropriate data collection tools, the questionnaires were to be given to the students who had been identified to be included in the sample. The reasons questionnaires were preferred to other forms of data collection, especially among the students include the following. One is that the questionnaires ensured a high response rate since they were distributed to the respondents who would fill them in their free time, therefore accurate answers as opposed to interviews where most were likely to decline due to the number of responsibilities that they have. Secondly, questionnaires require less time and energy to administer, in addition, they also offer anonymity to the respondents, as they are not supposed to record their names .The questionnaire was written in English language since all of the respondents were acquainted with the dialect.
The researcher personally collected data from the computers that the sample size used to access social sites with and distributed the questionnaires to the students; these questionnaires were to be filled over a period of one week.
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Literature review
Social media refers to the mode of interaction in which people create, share and exchange information in virtual spaces and networks; as such, it differs from the traditional media in terms of reach, quality, permanence and immediacy.
Social media takes different varieties such as magazines, internet forums, social blogs, social networks, and podcasts among other varieties, which share virtually any type of information and in any type of media.
Studies directly related
In the classroom setting, social media has had done more harm than good, this can be traced to its use which has been mainly to catch up with friends. Although this may be termed as healthy, it has led to break up of many relationships since one of the ways that face book ruins relationships is through the amount of time that one spends in social media and the jealousy that comes with it (O’Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011).
The amount of time that students spend on social media is also an area of concern since more than half of their time in school is spent in these social sites, a study on computer use among high school and intermediate students reveal that a significant part of time that students spend is wasted on social media sites chatting with friends and relatives. In addition, the mobile internet usage among this group is to access social sites such as Facebook, twitter, Instagram, whatsapp, Tumblr among others (Friesen & Lowe, 2012).
In using social media in education, several issues have been raised, one of them is the privacy of the students who use social media since they will have to reveal their identity, in addition, classroom activities on social media should not be visible to other people who are not members of the class (Friesen & Lowe, 2012). Insecurity is another issues that that is of concern in the use of social media in the classroom in addition to the integrity of students submissions since especially in the wake of academic issues such as plagiarism.
Social media in the classroom has had both its positives and negatives. Most of the students use social media for social purposes therefore leaving the potential to use it for education purposes unexploited. However, despite the negative of social media sites, they can be used positively to increase the interaction between teachers and students, for instance, lecturers can use Skype to interact with students when they are away from school
Studies tangentially related
Different people use social media for different purposes therefore the importance they attach to it. In this case, mobile social media applications enable an organization to know the movement of their customers, when they visited the premises and the response that they gave regarding the visit.
Organizations and employees in those social media sites also use social media for communication; this communication can be from the organization to customers or between the employees within an organization, it can also be used for employee training. Social media is also being used in the workplace as a tool for sales promotion and advertising; days are gone when individual used to print their advertisements and channel them to their preferred audience (Wankel, 2009). Nowadays organizations are targeting their advertisements to potential customers based on the type of internet activities that they have, for instance, Facebook displays advertises its clients products based on the internet activity of its users (Reuben, 2008).
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References
Dabbagh, N., & Kitsantas, A. (2012). Personal Learning Environments, social media, and self-regulated learning: A natural formula for connecting formal and informal learning. The Internet and higher education, 15(1), 3-8.
Friesen, N., & Lowe, S. (2012). The questionable promise of social media for education: connective learning and the commercial imperative. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 28(3), 183-194..
O’Keeffe, G. S., & Clarke-Pearson, K. (2011). The impact of social media on children, adolescents, and families. Pediatrics, 127(4), 800-804.
Reuben, R. (2008). The use of social media in higher education for marketing and communications: A guide for professionals in higher education. Available at http://doteduguru. com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/social-media-in-higher-education.pdf. accessed 13 March 2012.
Wankel, C. (2009). Management education using social media. Organization Management Journal, 6(4), 251-262.
